Bad Trap Syndrome (part 2), Curing the Bad Trap Blues

You are in a room. Before you are two doors. On the floor are ancient runes that say beyond one of these doors you’ll find the cure to the bad trap blues.

Choose wisely!

Door 1 — Writing a language of traps

To make more and better interactive traps we would need a language for traps. D&D has a complex language for combat and critters, but traps just borrow a little piece of it, usually to make more zap traps. When I made the traps for Death of Dr Null I extended things a little bit and laid out how each trap would operate each round, including rules for traps surprising or not surprising each character — if you’re not surprised, you get that much more opportunity to do something before the hammer drops.

A complete trap system would include building blocks for making multiple step interactive traps the same way the rules let you build elaborate types of monsters or characters, along with a subset of the combat system specifically for traps. What are the species of traps? How do you link these building blocks together to easily construct unique interactive traps? What kind of actions are appropriate in each? What can you do each round?*

The other rethink is to change how rogues or anyone else interferes with the trap. If the trap becomes a complex system like combat then the rogue can serve a prominent role during the interaction without stealing (or canceling) the show. Much the same way as a big armored fighter can protect other characters, the thief could weaken elements of the trap even while the party is in the middle of it. Poison darts strafe the party as they thread the idol maze, but because of the rogue’s warning everyone gets a bonus to their save. The rogue doesn’t prevent the water from filling the room, but his quick actions partially block the spigots giving the party more time to escape before the room fills up.

Door 2 — Traps as Role-playing

Like a lot of groups we’ve been getting back to our roots and playing some old school Basic D&D in memory of Gary Gygax. We’re talking a low-level dungeon crawl, 10′ poles, iron rations, the works.

When I made the dungeon I did something a little unusual: I made all the traps easy to spot.

Yep, no surprise traps. You might not know exactly _what_ the trap is, but it is always pretty clear there is something dangerous. It might be the remnants of past victims (a litter of half-melted bones scattered in front of one unusual door…) or some particularly suspicious detail (why is there an open spiked pit at the bottom of that staircase?).

Part of it is just game world logic: if there are monsters and other people tromping around, the only trap that would still be a hazard is one that resets, which means other things would have been killed before and their remains would still be there. A one-shot trap would have to literally be somewhere no one had ever gone before to still be a hazard. The other part is game balance: low level D&D can naturally be quite lethal, since any damage roll is a potential instant kill for the average character. The thief? Yeah, he has a 10% chance to find traps.

The interesting part is that removing the surprise and basically announcing there’s a trap (for anyone who’s paying attention) completely changes the dynamic of play. Instead of being a hit point tax for walking down the hall, it becomes, well, a game. The players huddle, they have their characters look around, they brainstorm possible dangers and ways to get around them. And since this is old school D&D and the no Spot check rule applies, they really do have to think and ask questions to figure out the problem. Even zap traps become interactive because the players are interacting with them before they go off.

Sure, even with all the time in the world and all the evidence to examine sometimes they come to completely incorrect conclusions about how the trap will work and walk smack into the buzz saw anyway (“it’s not a door, it’s a grey ooze pretending to be a door? Crap!”), but even when that does happen the players are engaged rather than turned off.

Why? They are seeing the results of their decisions (successful or disastrous) rather than being hit with something they couldn’t do anything about.

* yeah I know, some of you are screaming “system grids! system grids!” but we’ll have to save that for another time

@Zrog: Good question. I don’t think something needs to have intelligent design and malicious intent to be a trap in the game design sense. West Marches had lots of environmental hazards and all the same rules apply (they should be interactive not a zap trap, etc).

I’ve recently started doing things more along the lines of “Hazards” rather than “traps”. A deadfall, a crumbling floor/ceiling/wall, precariously-balanced jugs of acid, or some levers that just beg to be pulled.

In response to Dave (#2), the other alternative there is to play without Spot checks and simply make some traps far more easy to spot than others, depending on questions asked – sure, you may have spotted the tripwire, but what about the paving stone that isn’t cemented in..?

Loving this, just reading it now. Especially having just watched “Raiders of the Last Ark,” and that opening sequence.
I’m now thinking of ways to play with this in a one-on-one game, where the PC has no trap-breaking skill. You can always try what Indy tried– use a rock or a stick or a sandbag to try to set it off without harming yourself.

I agree that a lot of this has to do with language and the operating procedures within that language.
I have always treated the find trap skill as just that, that the PC in question has found something suspicious. No more.

Detailing a scything blade door trap, a pit trap where the fllor opens and snaps shut, and a poison gas trap, we get the following situations.

“You note an amost invisible wire running down the side of the door.”
“The cracks in the mortar on the floor seem wider here than before, and you se the glint of metal from between them”
“You get a whiff of an alchemical mixture in the air”

Similarly, A remove trap roll is treated almost as a trap lore check.
“If you cut the wire, which is tense, it will probably be the same as setting the trap off”
“When you look closely, the metal between the cracks contains some small gears that certainly move at least part of the floor, if not more”
“you are certain that this is a Krff derivitave, and surely a dangerous one. You will need another find roll to determine where it is coming from.”

So even simple traps can be more interactive if you change the language and procedure.
I enjoy using this same procedure with larger scale traps. The Pc’s will find a keyhole (or they won’t) that shuts off the traps in a corridor ahead, but do not have the key. They know that something is coing, but they go into it in ‘trap solving; mode. But this is facilitated by the system mentioned above, where they might smell or see something out of place, or hear something, if they succeed in something.
I had a pit trap in one of these with really narrow (1’) walkways. The PC’s never bothered to check the walkways…but in the pit below, there were bones in the front and the back of the pit, but none in the middle. If they’d notated that, they would have avoidedit.

One thing that comes to mind, besides having remains left, is using “Disable trap” as more of a knowledge check, like figuring out the possible chalanges and threats the trap has, I can see this much better for ROOM sized traps.

Like you can have just basic trap lore set up, so your rouge can say… figure out that the Acme brand was used for the cages over there, and seeing that they haven’t been opened and theirs movement, undead is a high possibility. :D

let alone I really don’t see how a rouge can disable a trap form across the room per-say.
Just figure out the gist of it how to disable, and say, throw a wrench in the gears. :)

A while back, my group was working on a futuristic dungeon-crawl-as-sport game in an attempt to get back the old dungeon love we once had. This was before we discovered playing Moldvay Red Box D&D. We had a very long ongoing discussion of traps and puzzles; about how to make them fun and “what’s their purpose anyway?” We failed in this. We couldn’t make sense of them. Even though we were already doing some stuff right, our final conclusion was not to use them.

You’ve nailed it, friend. Let’s rehabilitate the trap. Let’s make the trap-crawl RPG. I’m looking forward to seeing where you go with this in part 3. Examples?

Great stuff as usual, Mr Ludi. Reveal the presence of traps, yes! Why else do you think the opening to Raiders of the Lost Ark is so amazing? Not because of the devious traps. Because Indy shows us that there are dangerous traps.

Which has more tension, a party of adventurers standing before a golden statue, oblivious that their next steps will unleash a volley of poison darts, or the same party of adventurers, knowing that they’re steps from their goal, but somewhere between themselves and glory is some kind of devious, dangerous trap?

Yeah! Praise the Ludi! I’ve been wanting to use traps and now I know how to. There is a lot of stuff on creating traps but it has all felt like rubbish. At best it is “to make this fight against the ogres more interesting lets hit them with a Lightning bolt trap first.”
Now I might let them spot a potentially lethal trap, then make them choose between it and a potentially lethal encounter like a pair of adult red dragons and some of their young.

I have to admit, I do not like traps. Either they are too easy and a rogue walks past them or they are so dangerous as to be unfair. I tend to only include them if they are critical to the plot. You have some good ideas though. I might even drop a few into my next writing project.

I think this is something that a lot of GMs would benefit from, especially those who play “Dungeon Crawlers” a lot.
A lot of the time tabletop players can get so stuck up in the rules of the game that they forget the “role play” portion of their game. Anything that can bring people a little more into the role play instead of mucking about in rules is good in my book. I find players have a lot more fun that way.

I liked the idea of setting traps in a dungeon at various levels of difficulty. Setting some traps to be noticed with a spot check DC = to party level (PL) allows those member who are skilled spotters to casually notice traps that are not well hidden. Others could be PL+10 (more difficult) and still others could be PL +15 (Really difficult).

Those that are difficult are still easily seen by taking 10 (move action) from a skilled spotter, but could be difficult to do in combat, while distracted, or while running down a hall.

Those that are really difficult are still subject to discovery by a skilled spotter, but it will take a lot of time to find (can roll or take 20). So long as spot is a class skill and the skilled spotter has spent at least 1 pt per level.

Those who only have cross class ranks of spot aren’t immediately out of luck (and harshly penalized IMO). Taking 10 for these folks would still not likely benefit them, but taking 20 could be helpful as well as a lucky roll.

For those who don’t have any ranks in spot, they could benefit from taking 20, until about 6th level… at which point really difficult traps become impossible to find without some skill (at least 1 rank of spot).

No, seriously, you’ve opened my eyes. That never occurred to me before, and it really does make the “zap traps,” as you call them, infinitely more fun (not to mention fair). It’s definitely more interesting than, “Roll that die. Hmm, nope. Okay, now roll that die. Okay, you lose 3 hp as an arrow shoots out of the wall.”